6/19/2008 @ 12:34PM

Brand Me

Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are by Rob Walker ($25, Random House, 2008)

Early in his new book, Buying In, Rob Walker, who writes a column about advertising for The New York Times Magazine, confronts the discomfort he feels when he learns that
Nike
had purchased Converse, his favorite brand. After all, he reasons, he writes about marketing and advertising for a living, so shouldn’t he be a little smarter than to fall into the trap of basing his identity on a pair of sneakers? “I know why I rejected the swoosh,” he writes. “In Air Force 1′s, I’d feel like a brand zombie. But what I suddenly couldn’t reconcile was that I could project my individuality through some other brand.”

So begins his examination into the hold that brands have on our lives. In a work that should be familiar with fans of his “Consumed” column, Walker presents a series of case studies that focus not only on the intersections of consumerism and culture, but that show them, in many ways, to be one and the same.

The major shift in advertising hasn’t been the increasing demands of the consumer, he argues–and indeed, some of the book’s best running gags are the references to the “new, empowered consumer” and the danger he presents to businesses Walker culls going back to the 1920s. Instead, he focuses on Generation Y’s acceptance of advertising and marketing to the point that they often happily participate in it while at the same time voicing skepticism about its power.

In the course of the book, he interviews tastemakers ranging from Madison Avenue brand consultants to a supermarket dairy manager who has never left the state of New Hampshire to a group of bike messengers in Portland who helped resurrect the popularity of cheapo beer Pabst Blue Ribbon. All tell him the same basic thing: Branding, despite what we’ve heard time and time again, is far from dead. In fact, it’s more prevalent than ever.

But instead of a splashy Super Bowl ad, businesses now sell products through a subtle approach to marketing that combines emphasizing functionality with inviting consumers to actively reinvent and control the story and identity that is being sold.

Walker calls this phenomenon “murketing,” a blend of murky and marketing. His two main arguments for this cultural change are a new generational embrace of commercialization, and what he calls the Pretty Good Problem. The Pretty Good Problem is easy to explain: Every stove that you could buy at
Best Buy
, for example, is vastly superior to a top-of-the-line oven that you could buy 30 years ago. They’re all pretty good. So how does a marketer differentiate its product?

With murketing. Walker offers a variety of case studies showing businesses whose success can be tracked not to the functionality of the product, or even the message that it sends to consumers, but to a hazy combination of identity and interpretation. Consumers, Walker argues, are what give a brand meaning.

The blank-faced children’s icon Hello Kitty works, he says, precisely because it allows the consumer to project what he or she wants onto it.
Timberland
‘s sales took off in urban areas not because the shoe company marketed them to a specific demographic (in fact, the company was surprised that its functional work book was picked up by a consumer group it hadn’t envisioned), but because hip-hop fans embraced it to the point that a pair of the shoes were included in a museum exhibit entitled “Black Fashion Now.” Pabst Blue Ribbon became the hipster beer of choice precisely because it didn’t advertise and instead let word of mouth propel the brand’s popularity.

After detailing the stories of brands that succeeded while avoiding traditional advertising channels, Walker investigates why consumers latch onto to specific brands despite little to no difference between competitors. He illustrates Generation Y’s embrace of brand identities best by profiling Bobby Kim, a young fashion designer who goes by the name Bobby Hundreds and is behind The Hundreds, a label gaining cultural cachet from its base in Los Angeles.

Kim started the Hundreds with a law school friend after both realized that they didn’t want to become lawyers. Soon, they printed T-shirts that would appeal to skateboarders and surfers and sold them from their Hundreds Web site, which included essays about art and culture.

Despite the fact that the brand didn’t really sell anything functional–unlike skate brands like Vans, the Hundreds doesn’t make shoes or other equipment that could actually be used for skateboarding–it began selling out its run of clothing overnight. Walker posits that the Hundred’s success (the brand, founded in 2003, is now sold internationally) comes from the fact that young designers “don’t even need to study marketing. For most founders of underground brands, their apprenticeship was the act of growing up in a thoroughly commercialized world.”

For the Hundreds, like other brands, the good being sold is identity, even to consumers who wholeheartedly reject the idea that a brand like
Abercrombie & Fitch
could mean something.

For all of his research, Walker’s work at times feels disjointed. While the case studies and references to works ranging from social theorist Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone to Saturday Night Live puts Buying In squarely within the cultural conversation, at times a reader can feel like he’s not quite learning anything new. The most obvious reason for this is that Walker revisits many of the same companies that he’s previously written about in the Times Magazine.

Despite this, Buying In offers a compelling look at the state of advertising today and shows why even those who feel like they see through marketing feel attached to specific brands as a way to both project and foster their identities.